red and
honeycombed with pessimism. You need go but a little way beyond the
table d'hote and the guide book to feel the chill of despondency.
Without taking into account this new mood, it is vain to try to
understand the latest in art, music, fiction, poetry, thought,
politics. The one word "despair" is the key that opens up the meaning
of Ibsen's dramas, and Tolstoi's ethics, of Zola's novels, and Carmen
Sylva's poems, of Bourget's romances, and Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal.
It is the spiritual bond that connects Wagner's operas with
Turgenieff's novels, Amiel's journal with Marie Bashkirtseff's diary.
Naturalism in fiction, "decadence" in poetry, realism in art, tragedy
in music, scepticism in religion, cynicism in politics, and pessimism
in philosophy, all spring from the same root. They are the means by
which the age records its feelings of disillusionment.

The broad basis of the sadness of Europe to-day is keen political
disappointment. Forty years ago everybody hailed the policy of free
trade, peace, and international exhibitions as ushering in the era

"When the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furled
In the Parliament of mankind, the Federation of the World."

As if in mockery of these hopes came that terrific relapse of
civilization between 1855 and 1870. Then came a pause, and hope might
have revived had not the war epoch left behind it a strange and
appalling condition.

No one so unfortunate as to live between the Bosphorus and the English
Channel can view without dread the course Continental Europe has taken
since 1870. The armies have increased until France and Germany alone
have over six millions of soldiers. The Great Powers have now three
armed men for every two of ten years ago. "Our armaments," says
Premier Crispi, "are ruining Europe for the benefit of America." In a
paper picked up in a Venetian cafe I read these lines:--

"Throughout Europe we now hear of nothing but smokeless powder
and small bore rifles, heavy ironclads and swift cruisers,
torpedo boats and dynamite guns. Europe seems hastening on to
that time foretold by General Grant when, worn out by a fatal and
ruinous policy, she will bow to the supremacy of peace-loving
America, and learn anew from her the lessons of true
civilization."

Can we wonder that the European despairs? He finds himself aboard a
train that seems speeding to sure destruction. Neither pope, nor
chur